The Gaming Den

The goal of D&D 5e was to unite a fanbase that had broken apart due to the 4e disaster.

While some people (retards, mostly) like 5e, it does not seem to be successful in its unification goal.

Meanwhile, Pathfucker still exists and thrives on its continuation of the 3e legacy.

So unification should just be abandoned as a goal. Obviously WotC needs to have TWO D&D games: 5e, and 3e Special Edition. Well maybe not that name because that would be "Third Edition Special Edition" but whatever. Call it AD&D 3rd Edition like Frank Trollman says.

3e Special Edition could condense the massive amounts of 3e content and put the best content from all 3e to put into the core books (PHB, DMG, and MM). It could also address a few of the biggest complaints with Pathfucker and 3e. It is unrealistic to fix all the problems on a 15 year old game, but several of the major ones could be fixed without rewriting the entire system.

This would let us have 5e for the retards, and 3e Special Edition for people who like 3e and/or Pathfucker -- which is apparently a lot of people.

This is the only hope for WotC. Otherwise, they should just quit because they are fucktards.

AD&D 3 (or 3E SE) would amount to another Pathfinder. No real problems fixed, some minor new house rules, but enough random bullshit differences so you cannot really use the old stuff anymore.

No thanks.

Here's my thought, and this in no way changes my desire to lurk here and soak up the ambience. 5e is fine. Maybe that makes me a retard, but I have determined that due to continuing neurological problems and cognitive deterioration, I have r-word privileges. So far as I can tell it's getting asses into seats, there aren't quantum bears or institutionalized dogfuckings, and it may be dumbed down but it isn't completely stupid.

As far as releasing an "AD&D 3"... well, okay. Let's do it. We should all make a personal choice to either find a game we like and play it, or design and release our own fantasy heartbreaker that solves all the problems of 40+ years of the game and makes everyone happy. Shit or get off the pot.

*I realize that there is a respectable third option, that of perpetual criticism. Shitting on the lid of the pot, as it were. I'm totally fine with that, but what gets annoying is perpetual criticism with an associated expectation of it fixing things.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:but what gets annoying is perpetual criticism with an associated expectation of it fixing things.

What would you have us do? Yes so far we have been shut out when we point out things are wrong an suggest fixes, but I don't see how things are going to be fixed if we don't point out they are broken.

I don't know, man. There is a deep level of ironic failure of me complaining about it. Yes.

Ultimately I guess I want to see more creation. We have a lot of talent here. I think.

Medium Difficulty: 15

It's nice to know that d&d-land is now a comedy of errors where everyone but adventurers screw up three out of four tries at everything.

How do they manage to bring food to their tables? How can such a culture of screwups survive?

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Here's my thought, and this in no way changes my desire to lurk here and soak up the ambience. 5e is fine. Maybe that makes me a retard, but I have determined that due to continuing neurological problems and cognitive deterioration, I have r-word privileges. So far as I can tell it's getting asses into seats, there aren't quantum bears or institutionalized dogfuckings, and it may be dumbed down but it isn't completely stupid.

Don't be silly. We already decided. It makes you a 5ucker.

Are the asses that are getting into seats for 5e not already willing to get into a seat for a better designed RPG? If not, why not?

Anecdotally, they are people who have history with as recent as 3.5, seething to play something. Also, camp followers (read: teenagers and bemused spouses). As far as why, I assume it's simply familiarity and brand recognition.

And believe me, I'm not married to 5e. I'm just not going to waste energy actively shitting on it.

infected slut princess wrote:The goal of D&D 5e was to unite a fanbase that had broken apart due to the 4e disaster.

This may shock you, but the secret goal of 5E is to make money for its parent company, Hasbro.

infected slut princess wrote:So unification should just be abandoned as a goal. Obviously WotC needs to have TWO D&D games: 5e, and 3e Special Edition. Well maybe not that name because that would be "Third Edition Special Edition" but whatever. Call it AD&D 3rd Edition like Frank Trollman says. people.

Call it 3e Collectors Tomes. Then the people who directly correlate bookshelf weight to penis weight will have to have it, which is not an insignificant slice of the PF marketshare.

hogarth wrote:This may shock you, but the secret goal of 5E is to make money for its parent company, Hasbro.

All the more reason to give them flak for failing to uphold their project's goals, then. Because in doing so, they have failed to deliver for the bottom line, and Hasbro's accountants seem like harsh masters.

I'd call 5E many things, but unless all the neckbeards coming out of the woodwork to lavish it on social networks are merely a vocal minority, I wouldn't call it a commercial failure.

Dogbert wrote:I'd call 5E many things, but unless all the neckbeards coming out of the woodwork to lavish it on social networks are merely a vocal minority, I wouldn't call it a commercial failure.

That is what they said about 4e.

-Username17

JigokuBosatsu wrote:And believe me, I'm not married to 5e. I'm just not going to waste energy actively shitting on it.

I wouldn't call it a waste of energy. If you're going to shit, it may as well be on 5e.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:...in no way changes my desire to lurk here and soak up the ambience.

At the time of this post, you have 2165 posts. No matter what it is that you think you do here, you do not lurk .

hogarth wrote: This may shock you, but the secret goal of 5E is to make money for its parent company, Hasbro.

Oh, wow. I am truly amazed. Truly, you have deep insight regarding the world of corporate finance. I am impressed.

But that isn't a secret goal. It just goes without saying that Hasbro wants to have a profitable product in 5e. They are running a business, after all. Why even bother mentioning it? Would anyone be dumb enough to think that they don't want to make money with 5e?

The important question then becomes: what must happen to make lots of money? They need to have a successful D&D product. And to do that, they decided to focus on trying unite the broken D&D fanbase and repair the incredible damage wrought by the massive failure of 4e. The idea being that doing so would lead to a successful product and nice profits for Hasbro.

And they have failed because 5e is a miserable piece of retrogressive shit.

infected slut princess wrote:The important question then becomes: what must happen to make lots of money? They need to have a successful D&D product. And to do that, they decided to focus on trying unite the broken D&D fanbase and repair the incredible damage wrought by the massive failure of 4e. The idea being that doing so would lead to a successful product and nice profits for Hasbro. .

You're skipping a step or two.

In order to make lots of money, you have to:

1. Sell lots of product
   OR
2. Charge a lot of money per item

The latter is generally difficult, so you pick the former. Thus, you need to:

1. Sell to a lot of people
   OR
2. Sell a lot of stuff to each person

Doing the latter generally requires you to make a lot more game, so you pick the former. Thus, you need to get more customers, such as:

1. Your current customers
2. Your competitors' custormers
3. Your former customers (who may also be #2)
4. Completely new customers

As it happens, for WotC D&D, 1 isn't big enough, 2 and 3 overlap pretty hard, and 4 is fuckhuge.

Thus, you basically have a couple options:

1. Recapture players of pre-4e, without losing your 4e market
2. Recapture so many pre-4e players that losing the 4e market doesn't matter
3. Target the mainstream audience and grab from the squintillion people whose knowledge of D&D amounts to things like "I cast Magic Missile at the Darkness" and "That's, like, make believe World of Warcraft, right?"

#2 would be difficult, because you have competition from Pathfinder.

#3 would be difficult, because how the fuck do you even get these people into gaming?

Thus, they are trying to go with #1.

Not that 5e isn't terrible, but as far as it being a failure, Amazon disagrees. Two 5e books are in the top 30 of the best sellers list, and one of those is still a pre-order. That may not last, and none of us expect it to, but the truth is we can't objectively state that 5e is a financial failure while it's still selling pretty well.

As for speculation, while it's true that WotC just let the 4e market drift away, they are getting a lot of love from the 3e and even 2e crowds, anecdotally. It'll be as viable as anything that came before it. It won't swallow up the entire industry, but it's got D&D on the cover, it'll sell, it'll be played. It's drenched in nostalgia for the now middle-aged target market, which is lapping it up even as they notice things that don't seem to work. It's an easier game to teach new people than PF and certainly than 4e. If you're WotC, and you have to put out a poorly executed product that promises far, far more than it delivers (WotC's MO), then these are good promises to be making.

Come December, when the whole game is actually out, we'll start to see if it can hold its own through the holidays.

infected slut princess wrote:

hogarth wrote: This may shock you, but the secret goal of 5E is to make money for its parent company, Hasbro.

Oh, wow. I am truly amazed. Truly, you have deep insight regarding the world of corporate finance. I am impressed.

But that isn't a secret goal. It just goes without saying that Hasbro wants to have a profitable product in 5e. They are running a business, after all. Why even bother mentioning it? Would anyone be dumb enough to think that they don't want to make money with 5e?

The important question then becomes: what must happen to make lots of money? They need to have a successful D&D product. And to do that, they decided to focus on trying unite the broken D&D fanbase and repair the incredible damage wrought by the massive failure of 4e. The idea being that doing so would lead to a successful product and nice profits for Hasbro.

And they have failed because 5e is a miserable piece of retrogressive shit.

Here's the deal: profit is the goal. Everything else is just a means to that goal. Full stop.
Of course, Hasbro itself doesn't necessarily have their "finger on the pulse" of the TTRPG market, so to speak - they leave that shit to WotC. But one thing they do understand is the business of marketing/selling games/toys; and those principles are fairly universal. Furthermore, just because a particular business model isn't one you like or isn't one which makes sense to you, doesn't mean that it's not a valid model - remember, they've been at this a lot longer than any of us (there have been some seemingly-obvious goofs along the way; but on the whole, I'd say that Hasbro, as an entity, knows what they're doing).

Let me give you a non-game example of the kind of thing I'm talking about:
The Houston Astros.
The Astros regularly finish near the bottom of league, and have for quite a while. Not only is their total payroll the lowest in the entire league, the 2nd lowest payroll in the league is still twice that of the Astros. Every time they get anybody who shows any real potential, they trade him away. They refuse to invest one single dime more than they have to in order maintain minimum legal requirements. And it's not like they're setting up for a big rebuilding cycle - the owners actually do behave as if they genuinely don't give a shit. All in all, they're nothing more than a Minor League farm team in all but official designation.
But yet, despite all that, the Astros still net more money than any other team in the league. That's right, they have the largest nominal net profit of any team in MLB. By itself, that would be flat awesome; but when you then consider their marginal ROI, that # becomes totally insane.
And one of the reasons that they've been able to do that is that they don't allow Baseball Ego to get in the way of larger financial decisions. Of course, it also helps that they're the only MLB team in the 4th largest metropolitan area in the country (meaning that, no matter what, seats will be filled and merchandise will be sold).

Point being is that they have math-hammered what they have decided is the model that best fits the overall goals of the organization. Which can sometimes really suck for those who are emotionally attached to a particular product.

Stubbazubba wrote:Not that 5e isn't terrible, but as far as it being a failure, Amazon disagrees. Two 5e books are in the top 30 of the best sellers list, and one of those is still a pre-order. That may not last, and none of us expect it to, but the truth is we can't objectively state that 5e is a financial failure while it's still selling pretty well.

So, a new product of the culturally iconic game is released and it's selling well in the first month or two? What did you expect exactly? Pretty much everyone in the US knows vaguely what D&D is, even if they don't and never will play it. It's the current 'new thing.' 4e topped the charts when it was released too. We all know where it ended up.

It being a best seller on Amazon doesn't hold much if any weight at this point.

Previn wrote:

Stubbazubba wrote:Not that 5e isn't terrible, but as far as it being a failure, Amazon disagrees. Two 5e books are in the top 30 of the best sellers list, and one of those is still a pre-order. That may not last, and none of us expect it to, but the truth is we can't objectively state that 5e is a financial failure while it's still selling pretty well.

So, a new product of the culturally iconic game is released and it's selling well in the first month or two? What did you expect exactly? Pretty much everyone in the US knows vaguely what D&D is, even if they don't and never will play it. It's the current 'new thing.' 4e topped the charts when it was released too. We all know where it ended up.

It being a best seller on Amazon doesn't hold much if any weight at this point.

Sure, but then what evidence do we have that it's already failed? The DMG being pushed back? There's simply no smoking gun either way. We know it will fail because anything after the OGL will fail unless it is absolutely phenomenal and revolutionizes the industry in the same way. So saying it will fail is a given, even before Mike Mearls is attached. But to say that it already has failed is premature. As you said, it's selling well in the first month or two, and with the staggered release they'll string it out a few more months. Only when those die down can we start to say it has failed, financially.

Even in other metrics, everyone's talking about it, it's generating a lot of positive feedback from people who can't be bothered to look at it very hard, it has captured the TTRPG market's mindshare at this point. Now of course the real measure is how long it can hold that mindshare. I know that, and I am confident it won't be more than about 6-9 months. But it will be that long before I can expect to be taken seriously when I say it has failed, past tense.

I'm with Stubbazubba on this one. The game will most likely fail but saying it is dead is premature. I think by February will pretty tell for certain if it has failed.

ACOS wrote:Point being is that they have math-hammered what they have decided is the model that best fits the overall goals of the organization. Which can sometimes really suck for those who are emotionally attached to a particular product.

I don't see you could interpret WotC's bumbling with regard to D&D as evidence that they're evil geniuses. Remember these are the people who made a new edition so badly that another company was able to that the #1 spot in RPGs by taking the old edition and slapping a new coat of paint on it.

So because it's selling well at this very moment, we can't say that it has failed. Technically we can't say it is failing because sales are doing okay and people are talking about it. But we all know it is going to fail soon enough.

So if it is going to have failed but it isn't failing now, does that mean it's in a quantum state of failure?

What if the DMG getting pushed back is just the prelude... to the DMG getting cancelled completely?

Would you expect anything else from Mearls? I bet he won't even get it finished ever. It will be like the RPG version of George RR Martin.

I mean, the freeware Dungeon Master basic rules they released... weren't DMG-style rules. It was like... all monsters. Seriously, go look at it.

They've got nothing. NOTHING.